Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.

Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.

'Christine Brewer … combine opulent, blazing tone, fearless top notes and surprising agility' (The Daily Telegraph)'Christine Brewer in magisterial voice … a major project, beautifully performed and presented' (The Independent)» More

Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. In this third volume, the wonderful young British tenor Andrew Kennedy performs a range of songs, from favourites such ...» More

'this is singing which is always alive, interesting, and personal … a fascinating record' (Gramophone)'[Schade] sings Strauss’s Cäcilie and a wonderfully hushed Zueignung as though he and Martineau were the first to discover their ecstasy ...» More

'This remarkable German soprano takes us on some giddy flights with superb breath control and a quite amazing concentration of vocal energy. But she n ...'It's hard to dispute Roger Vignoles's claim that Anne Schwanewilms is 'a great singing actress'. That's clear in every song, where both the overall t ...» More

Yes, you know, dear soul, How I suffer when away from you; Love makes the heart sick, Thanks to you.

Once I toasted freedom, Held aloft the amethyst goblet, And you blessed the drink. My thanks to you.

And you exorcised the evil spirits within it, Until I, as I had never before been, Blessed, blessed, sank down upon your heart – Have thanks.

Zueignung, Op 10 No 1, a fervent masterpiece from the composer’s first song collection and a favourite with audiences from the moment it hit print, is imbued with melodic nobility and enlivened by Strauss’s flair for impassioned climax.

Strauss’s publishing debut as a song composer was extraordinary by any standards. Three of the eight songs of Opus 10, including Zueignung, have been mainstays of the repertoire ever since. Composed in 1882–3, they were his first mature songs (he had composed forty-odd songs before this, but rightly held them back from publication) and immediately revealed the essential features of his style: arching vocal phrases, a seductive play of harmonic colour and an orchestral Schwung to the piano accompaniments. The texts are by the Tyrolean poet Hermann von Gilm, who actually gave the title of Zueignung (‘Dedication’) not to this song, but to two other poems. It was, however, an apt title for the first song in the group, and it is only a small shame that the song that Strauss planned as a beginning so often finds itself at the close of a programme, where its showy climax and repeated strains of ‘Habe Dank!’ make it an inevitable, if nowadays hackneyed choice as an encore.

I should name, you say, my Queen in the realm of love? You are fools, for I know Her less than you do.

Ask me about the colour of her eyes; Ask me about the sound of her voice; Ask me about her gait and posture, and how she dances; Ah, what do I know about it?

Is not the sun the source Of all life and all light? And about this, what do I and you and everyone know? Nothing.

English: Emily Ezust

Promise of the soaring operatic vocalism to come had already been evident in Strauss’s very first volume of songs (Op 10), assembled in 1885 but based on material written two or three years earlier. Nichts, Op 10 No 2, finally revised on 11 August 1885, may abound in rhythmic whimsy, but the melody wafts rapturously aloft at the question, ‘Is not the sun the source of all life and light?’.

The youthful élan of this song shows remarkable confidence in Strauss’s powers as a song-writer. Set up by the piano’s strumming prelude and its emphatic downbeats, the voice enters eagerly on a syncopated upbeat and rises impetuously through an octave and a half to top A on ‘Königin’. Rhythmic emphasis is used throughout to underline the poem’s rhetorical flourishes—for instance in the accelerating list of ‘Gang—und Tanz—und Haltung’. So too is the contrastingly lyrical treatment of ‘Fragt mich nach der Augen Farbe’ and above all ‘Ist die Sonne nicht die Quelle’, which introduces a new theme of consummate beauty in the appropriately remote key (for the sun’s unfathomable mystery) of C sharp major.

Die Nacht is the third, and arguably the most beautiful of the eight settings of Hermann von Gilm that Strauss published as his Op 10. With its rapt stillness underpinned by a sense of barely identifiable foreboding, this song alone would have clearly established the eighteen-year-old composer’s credentials as a master of the Lied. The piano’s softly pulsating quavers recall Schumann’s Mondnacht, but the arching vocal lines are pure Strauss, their top notes perfectly placed to exploit the beauty of the soprano voice. In the poem the night is personified, almost like a wild animal that creeps out of the forest, stealing colour and detail from the landscape. At first the piano part seems written for the softest of footfalls. But gradually the harmonies darken, as the singer reveals his fear that his beloved too may be stolen by the night. The gathering unease is underlined by the structure of the poem, which replaces the expected fourth line of each stanza with one of just three syllables. ‘Nun gib Acht!’ / ‘Weg vom Feld’ / ‘Weg das Gold’—together they toll through the poem like a refrain until the final drawn out ‘Dich—mir—auch’, where the interrupted cadence is like a shudder at the heart of nature.

One of the weightier of the Opus 10 settings, Die Georgine is a song about late-flowering love. Sharp sforzando chords in the piano prelude suggest a blaze of colour glimpsed in the dusk (I am often reminded of this song when playing the introduction to Schubert’s equally evocative and harmonically adventurous Dass sie hier gewesen). While the accompaniment to the first three verses has a similar triplet-fuelled undertow to Zueignung, the address to the flower opens almost conversationally, as one modest individual to another. In the final verse the tone deepens, literally, with the poet’s reference to his own experience, or lack of it, and it is a masterly touch to reprise the piano introduction just before the end, when the reference to the pain as well as the delight of love explains the exquisite sharpness of the song’s opening harmonies.

‘Patience’, you say, and point with a white finger At my future’s firmly locked door; Is the present moment any less Than those to be born? tell me; If you can postpone spring with love, I shall borrow from you an eternity, But loving also ends with spring, And time pays no debts of the heart.

‘Patience’, you say and lower your black locks, And petals fall hourly from the flower, And hourly a funeral bell demands The final fare of tears for the grave. Just see how the days speed by, Listen, as they knock in warning at the heart: Open up, open up: what today we do not achieve Will tomorrow be lost irreparably.

‘Patience’, you say, and lower your eyelids, My bid for happiness is denied, Farewell then, I’ll never see you again, My implacable destiny wills it so. You believed that, because others have to wait, And can wait, I too must and can, But I have for loving and kissing Merely one single spring, like the rosebush.

The 6/8 rhythm gives a ballad-like character to this unusual setting, the voice part freely inflected to give a sense of natural speech, the repetitions of ‘Geduld, sagst du’ heavy with irony. If the attempt at naturalness is not quite successful, the match between words and melody sometimes constrained, the effect is not out of keeping with the emotional content of the poem, in which the singer rejects his beloved’s demand for patience. Building to a dramatic climax, the song is impressive in performance, but it probably suffers from being less concise than the best of Op 10.

I have—let it here be declared Before the entire world— Secretly confided to very many The wrong that you have done me.

I told the whole host of flowers, I told it softly to the violet, Loudly to the rose, and louder still To the wide-eyed camelia.

But there is nothing to worry about, Just stay cheerful and happy, Those who knew it are all dead And will never let on.

English: Richard Stokes

The vehement reproach of Die Verschwiegenen is not without irony, and Strauss laces it with fierce dissonances and scornful vocal flourishes. As in Nichts the rhythmic shape is skilfully deployed, with key syllables drawn out for maximum emphasis: e.g. ‘sagt’s—Blumenheer—Veilchen—lauter—Großäugigen’. Notionally, the last two lines of the poem let the girl off the hook, but Strauss gives no quarter in either voice or piano, the terse three-chord postlude driving the message home.

On a freshly mown meadow Stands the meadow saffron alone, The body of a lily, The colour of a rose.

But it is poison that glistens so rosily From the pure chalice; The last flower, the last love Are both beautiful, but deadly.

English: Richard Stokes

Among the shortest of the songs of Opus 10, Die Zeitlose begins with appropriate modesty, evolving from the first-inversion chord with which it begins. At ‘Doch es ist Gift’ the harmonies darken and become more poignant, with a note of sober reflection in the descending E flat arpeggio of ‘Dem reinen, blinkt so rötlich’, and a Neapolitan A flat colouring to ‘die letzte Lieb’’. Triplet drumbeats make a tiny funeral march of the playout.

Many features of this song have made it justly famous: the aching nostalgia of the arching phrase of the opening, reprised at the beginning of the third stanza; the almost casual first entrance of the voice as though continuing a conversation already begun off stage; the intimate shift to C minor at ‘Gib mir die Hand’ and the harmonic frisson of the piano’s spread chord before the final ‘Wie einst im Mai’. Here again, in his first published opus, all the hallmarks of Strauss the future opera composer were already present, perfectly crafted for the medium of voice and piano, and revealing him as a master of his own kind of Lied.